This is a trap. Anyone who predicts things accurately will end up in a windowless bunker in the woods north of Washington, while insane biologists shoot you full of experimental drugs to make your predictions more accurate and try to prove it isn't all by chance.Don't even give these people your email address. You'll be on their list.

rumpelstiltskin:This is a trap. Anyone who predicts things accurately will end up in a windowless bunker in the woods north of Washington, while insane biologists shoot you full of experimental drugs to make your predictions more accurate and try to prove it isn't all by chance.Don't even give these people your email address. You'll be on their list.

Cythraul:rumpelstiltskin: This is a trap. Anyone who predicts things accurately will end up in a windowless bunker in the woods north of Washington, while insane biologists shoot you full of experimental drugs to make your predictions more accurate and try to prove it isn't all by chance.Don't even give these people your email address. You'll be on their list.

Would you like some Neuroin?

Actually, rumpelstiltskin's worries are... well... reasonably close to mine. I've worked for one of the members of the IC (though not in the part of it that deals with the IC), and have been told by someone in another member of the IC that given what some of my other work has entailed, oh yes, there most certainly are files on me. So... if I'm already on their list, do I really want to be even more on their list?

I've actually emailed someone to ask whether me taking the survey would be an even worse idea than them posting it in the first place. ;)

rumpelstiltskin:This is a trap. Anyone who predicts things accurately will end up in a windowless bunker in the woods north of Washington, while insane biologists shoot you full of experimental drugs to make your predictions more accurate and try to prove it isn't all by chance.Don't even give these people your email address. You'll be on their list.

sidcart42:This research is based on actual evidence that the collective consciousness of the internet has responded in peculiar ways prior to major world events.

It's based in a lot of swarm theory sort of junk, and is pretty cool.

It is cool. The most important example that comes to mind is the location of a nuclear weapon lost in the Med. A group of random people were asked where they though it sank in the ocean and in a statistically weird thing, an unusually large number of guesses were clustered very close to its actual location.

sidcart42:This research is based on actual evidence that the collective consciousness of the internet has responded in peculiar ways prior to major world events.

What, exactly, is the rationale? The same Internet gave "Gangnam Style" over 1 billion hits. Now, I rode that wave of pop culture as much as anyone else, so it's not like a humorous music video getting lots of attention strikes me as a collapse of modern culture. My point is, if this sort of research involves any level of filtering out the noise, you're essentially tossing the "collective consciousness of the Internet" itself.

dragonchild:sidcart42: This research is based on actual evidence that the collective consciousness of the internet has responded in peculiar ways prior to major world events.

What, exactly, is the rationale? The same Internet gave "Gangnam Style" over 1 billion hits. Now, I rode that wave of pop culture as much as anyone else, so it's not like a humorous music video getting lots of attention strikes me as a collapse of modern culture. My point is, if this sort of research involves any level of filtering out the noise, you're essentially tossing the "collective consciousness of the Internet" itself.

I know nothing is obscure on Fark, but that's pretty darn close.I can hear his voice, and had to run through more of the intro in my head to find the series title ..Awesome show about interpersonal connections in the age of the interwebs.

NB: This sentence - "Three hundred million people with access to the integrated North American data-net is a nice big number of potential consultees. " was written no later than 1975. Anyone who hasn't read Brunner's 'dystopian' novels, should.

Somebody read Shockwave Rider and implemented a Delphi pool.Meh, unless it really works.Keep in mind the caution of the late, lamented philosopher/statistician George Carlin:Just think of how stupid the average person is, and then realize half of them are even stupider!

Hidden between the lines is that they can use these studies to determine where the information comes from that gives the collective unconscious of the Internet the predictive knowledge. Then it's only a matter of time until everything we know is a shadow puppet show.

i read the US guv'mint collected together the major comic books writers days after 9/11. their objective was to use these talented imaginations to unearth other ways or means terrorists may next use to strike within our border (now called Homeland for reasons unknown). i thought this was smart of our gov't agencies to do this. sure they have all sorts of think tanks at their disposal. those people are highly educated, and that type of brilliance is much different than the brilliance of imagination.

i never read any more about this get-together. if it really did happen, those that were invited were probably sworn to secrecy. they were probably given really cool badges or something, because what fan boy wouldn't want to be part of some secret Peace Keeper League? that would be farking awesome.

demaL-demaL-yeH:Somebody read Shockwave Rider and implemented a Delphi pool.Meh, unless it really works.Keep in mind the caution of the late, lamented philosopher/statistician George Carlin:Just think of how stupid the average person is, and then realize half of them are even stupider!

Charles_Nelson_Reilly:demaL-demaL-yeH: Somebody read Shockwave Rider and implemented a Delphi pool.Meh, unless it really works.Keep in mind the caution of the late, lamented philosopher/statistician George Carlin:Just think of how stupid the average person is, and then realize half of them are even stupider!

Amusing confusion between average and median is amusing.

/"Wisdom of the Crowd" FTW

When speaking about an observed standard distribution over a population greater than 300,000,000? Mean = median.

/Now calculate the confidence interval of the population mean given the non-random sample of non-foreign farkers who have posted so far in this thread.//Don't teach your grandpa to do power calculations.